Re: [Fis] CONSILIENCE's importance

Dear colleagues,

Around Malcolm's question 1, one could make quite a few excursions related
to the informational approach we at FIS are aiming at.

>(1) Is the consilience of inductions a clear notion?... Why is this
>especially significant?

Every new science demands a new philosophy --or at least it introduces new
necessities, problems, aspirations, etc. Quite often, the concoction of the
new philosophy (or the articulation of the new emphasis) is achieved by
reconstructing the past, in the sense that the interested parties have to
backtrack along the overall paths of scientific-philosophical developments
so as to find out some good idea which was left almost dormant and could
now cross-fertilize the new perspectives.

I have argued several times in this list about the many problems of the
"interdisciplinary methods" (relying on old 'trouts' such as Ortega y
Gasset and Whitehead), and do not want to repeat myself and make another
long message about that. But I need to air some motivations on the
organization of the current discussion. Around "consilience" there might be
quite fertile conceptualizations contributing to bring more philosophical
coherence into the nascent efforts of fis. Particularly it might lead to a
newer, more cogent contemplation both of the "consilience problems" around
the relationships between separate disciplines and of the global
architecture of the current multidisciplinary system of the sciences.
Consilience is a great philosophical branch to explore, including
sophisticate formal aspects too. And we have several weeks to quietly dig
into its informational usefulness and originalities...

best

Pedro

_______________________________________________
fis mailing list
fis@listas.unizar.es
http://webmail.unizar.es/mailman/listinfo/fis
Received on Tue Sep 21 11:41:09 2004